"Dr. Dupree," he said, putting out his hand. "I'm Allen Fulton. Are you headed into Arizona?"
I told him I'd been bounced off the Interstate down by the border.
"I'm not sure you'll do any better on ten. Nights like this it seems like everybody in Los Angeles wants to move east. Like the flicker's some kind of earthquake or tidal wave."
"I'll be back on the road before long."
He handed me a key. "Get a little sleep. Always good advice."
"The card's okay? If you want cash—"
"Card's good as cash as long the world doesn't end. And if it does I don't suppose I'll have time to regret it."
He laughed. I tried to smile.
Ten minutes later I was lying fully clothed on a hard bed in a room that smelled of potpourri-scented antiseptic and too-damp air-conditioning, wondering whether I should have stayed on the road. I put the phone at the bedside and closed my eyes and slept without hesitation.
* * * * *
And woke less than an hour later, alert without knowing why.
I sat up and scanned the room, charting gray shapes and darkness against memory. My attention eventually settled on the pallid rectangle of the window, the yellow curtain that had been pulsing with light when I checked in.
The flicker had stopped.
Which should have made it easier to sleep, this gentler darkness, but I knew in the way one knows such things that sleep had become impossible. I had corralled it for a brief time but now it had jumped the fence, and there was no use pretending otherwise.
I made coffee in the little courtesy percolator and drank a cup. Half an hour later I checked my watch again. Fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity. Might as well shower and get back on the road.
I dressed and walked down the silent concrete walkway to the motel lobby, expecting to drop the key in a mail slot; but
Fulton, the owner, was still awake, television light pulsing from his back room. He put his head out when he heard me rattle the door.
He looked peculiar. A little drunk, maybe a little stoned. He blinked at me until he recognized me. "Dr. Dupree," he said.
"Sorry to bother you again. I need to get back on the road. Thank you for your hospitality, though."
"No need to explain," he said. "I wish you the best of luck. Hope you get somewhere before dawn."
"I hope so, too."
"Me, I'm just watching it on television."
"Oh?"
Suddenly I wasn't sure what he was talking about.
"With the sound turned down. I don't want to wake Jody. Did I mention Jody? My daughter. She's ten. Her mom lives in La Jolla with a furniture repairman. Jody spends the summers with me. Out here in the desert, what a fate, huh?"
"Yeah, well—"
"But I don't want to wake her." He looked suddenly somber. "Is that wrong? Just to let her sleep through it? Or as long as she can? Or maybe I should wake her up. Come to think of it, she's never seen 'em. Ten years old. Never seen 'em. I guess this is her last chance."
"Sorry, I'm not sure I understand—"
"They're different, though. They're not the way I remember. Not that I was ever any kind of expert… but in the old days, if you spent enough nights out here, you'd kind of get familiar with 'em."
"Familiar with what?"
He blinked. "The stars," he said.
* * * * *
We went out by the empty swimming pool to look at the sky.
The pool hadn't been filled for a long time. Dust and sand had duned at the bottom of it, and someone had tagged the walls with ballooning purple graffiti. Wind rattled a steel sign (no lifeguard on duty) against the links of the fence. The wind was warm and from the east.
The stars.
"See?" he said. "Different. I don't see any of the old constellations. Everything looks kind of… scattered."
A few billion years will do that. Everything ages, even the sky; everything tends toward maximum entropy, disorder, randomness. The galaxy in which we live had been racked by invisible violence on a great scale over the last three billion years, had swirled its contents together with a smaller satellite galaxy (M41 in the old catalogs) until the stars were spread across the sky in a meaningless sprawl. It was like looking at the rude hand of time.
Fulton said, "You okay there, Dr. Dupree? Maybe you ought to sit down."
Too numb to stand, yes. I sat on the rubberized concrete with my feet dangling into the shallow-end declivity of the pool, still staring up. I had never seen anything as beautiful or as terrifying.
"Only a few hours before sunrise," Fulton said mournfully.
Here. Farmer east, somewhere over the Atlantic, the sun must already have breached the horizon. I wanted to ask him about that, but I was interrupted by a small voice from the shadows near the lobby door. "Dad? I could hear you talking." That would be Jody, the daughter. She took a tentative step closer. She was wearing white pajamas and a pair of unlaced sneakers to protect her feet. She had a broad, plain-but-pretty face and sleepy eyes.
"Come on over, darlin'," Fulton said. "Get on up on my shoulders and have a look at the sky."
She clambered aboard, still puzzled. Fulton stood, hands on her ankles, lifting her that much closer to the glittering dark.
"Look," he said, smiling despite the tears that had begun to track down his face. "Look there, Jody. Look how far you can see tonight! Tonight you can see all the way to the end of practically everything."
* * * * *
I stopped back at the room to check the TV for news—Fulton said most of the cable news stations were still broadcasting. The flicker had ended an hour ago. It had simply vanished, along with the Spin membrane. The Spin had ended as quietly as it had begun, no fanfare, no noise except for a crackle of uninterpretable static from the sunny side of the planet.
The sun.
Three billion years and change older than it had been when the Spin sealed it away. I tried to remember what Jase had told me about the current condition of the sun. Deadly, no question; we were out of the habitable zone; that was common knowledge. The image of boiling oceans had been mooted in the press; but had we reached that point yet? Dead by noon, or did we have until the end of the week?
Did it matter?
I turned on the motel room's small video panel and found a live broadcast from New York City. Major panic had not yet set in. Too many people were still asleep or had foregone the morning commute when they woke up and saw the stars and drew the obvious conclusions. The crew at this particular cable newsroom, as if in a fever dream of journalistic heroism, had set up a rooftop camera pointed east from the top of Todt Hill on Staten Island. The light was dim, the eastern sky brightening but still void. A pair of barely-holding-it-together anchors read to each other from freshly faxed bulletins.
There had been no intelligible link with Europe since the end of the flicker, they said. This might be due to electrostatic interference, the unmediated sunlight washing out aerostat-linked signals. It was too soon to draw dire conclusions. "And as always," one of the newscasters said, "although we don't have official reaction yet, the best advice is to stay put and stay tuned until we sort all this out. I don't think it would be inappropriate to ask people to remain in their homes if at all possible."
"Today of all days," his partner agreed, "people will want to be close to their families."
I sat on the edge of the motel-room mattress and watched until the sun rose.
The high camera caught it first as a layer of crimson cloud skimming the oily Atlantic horizon. Then a boiling crescent edge, filters sliding over the lens to stop down the glare.
The scale of it was hard to parse, but the sun came up (not quite red but ruddy orange, unless that was an artifact of the camera) and came up some more and kept coming up until it hovered over the ocean, Queens, Manhattan, too large to be a plausible heavenly body, more like an enormous balloon filled with amber light.